Whistlejacket (c. 1762)
National Gallery, London
Life-size rearing Arabian stallion against a plain background, painted for the Marquess of Rockingham
Image: George Stubbs · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Art
George Stubbs
1724–1806 · English
British sporting art
George Stubbs was a Liverpool-born painter who became the greatest horse painter of Georgian England. His painstaking dissections of horses gave his animal pictures an anatomical accuracy no one had matched, and his life-size Whistlejacket is one of the National Gallery's best-loved images.
How to spot them
- ▸Horses rendered with anatomical precision – glossy racehorses, mares and foals, or a rearing stallion on a blank background
- ▸Exotic animals painted for Georgian patrons: a zebra, a kangaroo, a dingo, a cheetah
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Liverpool-born painter' plus 'The Anatomy of the Horse' or 'Whistlejacket' almost always means Stubbs
Key works
The Anatomy of the Horse (1766)
Original drawings at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Book of engravings based on his own dissections of horses in Lincolnshire
Mares and Foals in a River Landscape (c. 1763–1768)
Tate, London
One of his calm, frieze-like groups of mares and foals
Image: George Stubbs · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Zebra (1763)
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Portrait of the zebra kept in the menagerie of Queen Charlotte
The Kongouro from New Holland (1772)
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
First depiction of a kangaroo in Western art, based on a skin brought back from Cook's Endeavour voyage
Image: George Stubbs · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Liverpool in 1724, the son of a currier (leather worker).
- •Spent around 18 months in the 1750s dissecting horses at a farmhouse in Horkstow, Lincolnshire.
- •His book 'The Anatomy of the Horse' was published in 1766.
- •Whistlejacket was acquired by the National Gallery in 1997.
- •The Kongouro and a companion painting of a dingo were commissioned by the naturalist Joseph Banks.
- •He experimented with painting in enamel on ceramic plaques made by Josiah Wedgwood.
- •Late in life he worked on a comparative anatomy of the human body, a tiger and a common fowl.
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Sources
- National Gallery, London — Whistlejacket – George Stubbs
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — George Stubbs